‘Woman and the Sport Fetish’: Modernity, Consumerism and Sports Participation in Inter-War Britain

Abstract

The emergence of the ‘modern woman’ in Inter-War Britain was the result of a process which began at the end of the previous century. The new modern woman was symbolic of youth and freedom; she embraced life and spent her time in the pursuit of fun and enjoyment. The female body was, in many ways, one of the central focuses of the new modernity. The way it was dressed, its hair styled and even its shape were all intrinsic symbols of a woman's conformity to modernity and its associated ideals. Sport could provide an opportunity to train and tone the body in an effort to conform to the new idealised ‘boyish’ shape, to improve posture and, it was believed, even to enhance beauty. Sport therefore offered an opportunity to acquire some of the ‘essential’ attributes of the young modern woman, a lithe figure with grace of carriage and clear complexion. However, sport also played an important role in lifestyle.

Yet sport's place in discussions of modernity has been overlooked by British sports and gender historians. This article will seek to address this gap in the historiography by examining the intersection between concepts of modernity and sport. As we will see, there is much evidence to suggest that participation in sport was a fundamental, yet hitherto overlooked, element of modernity for many women during the inter-war period in Britain. This study will explore the centrality of sport to the lives of these modern women by probing notions of emancipation and developments in fashion and consumer culture alongside the concomitant developments of sport for women.

Keywords:

• sport
• inter-war
• Britain
• modernity
• fashion
• consumerism
• female

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr Susan Bandy for her help in editing this article and the referees for their useful comments. I would also like to thank Dr Annmarie Hughes for reading and commenting on an early draft of this work.

Notes

1. Howkins and Lowerson, Trends in Leisure.

2. Notable exceptions to this are the short studies of Hargreaves, ‘The Inter-War Years; and Huggins, ‘And Now, Something for the Ladies’.

3. Hargreaves, ‘The Inter-War Years’; Huggins, ‘And Now, something for the Ladies’; and Skillen, Escaping the Humdrum.

4. The quotation in the title is taken from an article on the women's pages of The Saturday Review. See M. Seaton, ‘Woman and the Sport Fetish’, The Saturday Review, December 1931, 821.

5. Skillen and Osborne, ‘The State of Play: Women and Sport History’.

6. This study has developed out of my Ph.D. research, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and my forthcoming book, Skillen, Escaping the Humdrum.

7. Bingham, ‘“An Era of Domesticity”?’, 230; For more information on this see Alexander, ‘Becoming a Woman in London in the 1920s and 1930s’; Langhamer, Women's Leisure in England; Søland, Becoming Modern; Todd, Young Women, Work and Family ; and Fowler, ‘Teenage Consumers?’.

8. Barlow et al., ‘The Modern Girl around the World.

9. Ibid., 249.

10. For example, see Dyhouse, Glamour; Horn, Women in 1920s; and Stanley, Modernizing Tradition.

11. Hargreaves, Sporting Females, 112 ; Howkins and Lowerson, Trends in Leisure; and Skillen, ‘“When Women Look Their Worst”’.

12. Hargreaves, Sporting Females, 118–120.

13. Hill, Sport, Leisure and Culture in Twentieth Century Britain, 167; and Brown, ‘The Scottish Office and Sport 1899–1972’.

14. Hargreaves, Sporting Females, 118.

15. Ibid.

16. Langhamer, Women's Leisure in England, 188.

17. Skillen, Escaping the Humdrum.

18. While newspapers, magazines, club minutes, government and council reports were used extensively in my research, these sources do not actually tell us about individual experience. Oral history interviews have proved invaluable in my research to uncover not only this type of participation but also the meanings attached to it. The interviews conducted focused on a specific time frame, the years between 1920 and 1938. However, these boundaries were not rigorously adhered to and this allowed respondents to explore wider changes in their leisure habits. The oral history project encompassed 10 interviews, recorded between 2004 and 2007. In addition a collection of transcripts deposited by Jane George were drawn upon to augment findings from the other interviews. A more informal round-table discussion was also conducted in one of the care homes visited with a group of eight women.

19. See, Skillen, Escaping the Humdrum, chapter 2.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. See Søland, Becoming Modern; Hargreaves Sporting Females; Langhamer Women's Leisure in England; and Huggins, ‘And Now, Something for the Ladies’.

23. However these activities were amongst the most often cited in the advertising and advice literature of the period.

24. Bargielowska, Managing the Body.

25. ‘Health Culture for Girls’, The Times, 3 March 1922, 9.

26. Scotsman, 18 September 1936, 11.

27. For detailed discussion see Webster, ‘The Health of the School Child during the Depression’; and Skillen, ‘“A Sound System of Physical Training”’.

28. Margaret Hallam, ‘Physical Exercises’, Times’ Women’s Supplement, October 1920, 60.

29. Bargielowska, Managing the Body, 1.

30. As will be discussed later in this article, advertisers drew on these ideals to promote various products.

31. Atchison, ‘Shades of Change’; Morgan, ‘Aesthetic Athletics’; and Skillen, ‘Women and Sport a Change in Taste’, ch. 5.

32. For example, see Todd, Young Women, Work and Family; and Søland, Becoming Modern.

33. Søland has argued that part of the conflict surrounding these changes was due to the fact that young women wanted leisure time for sports and other physical activities and that had they been requiring time to pursue activities such as sewing or reading there would have been less conflict. See Søland, Becoming Modern, 74.

34. Constanzo, ‘Images of Gender in Punch 1901–10’, 47.

35. Letter to the Editor from Basil Mathews, The Times, 4 May 1922, 17.

36. ‘Ladies in Sport’, The Times, 15 February 1919, 3.

37. ‘Ladies in Sport, Lawn Tennis and Golf’, The Times, 1 March 1919, 5.

38. Bargielowska, Managing the Body, 107.

39. Brown, ‘Sport and the Scottish Office in the Twentieth Century’, 166; and Holt, ‘Golf and the English Suburb’.

40. Interview with author, Greta*, 25th October 2005. *All interviewee's names have been anonymised.

41. Burman, ‘Racing Bodies’, 305.

42. ‘The Revolution in Dress’, The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, 29 August, 230.

43. See ‘Highway of Fashion’, Tatler throughout the period. White has also found similar examples in her study, Women's Magazines (see p. 114).

44. While it was most common to find these types of patterns in working-class publications, White has found that even staunchly middle-class magazines such as The Lady began publishing dress patterns during this period. See White, Women's Magazines, 100. For example of ‘updates’, see Good Housekeeping features throughout the period especially ‘The Mending Basket’, February 1922. Companies also advertised the alteration services emphasising their abilities to ‘modernise’ last season's fashions. See Stevenson's of Dundee, Tatler, Vol. 96, 1925.

45. Daily Sketch, 24 June 1931, 47, quoted in Horwood, ‘Dressing like Champions’.

46. ‘The Revolution in Dress’, The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, 29 August 1925, 230.

47. Tatler's readership was largely middle class, however, random samples of other magazines with a much lower middle and upper working-class readership, such as Woman's Own and Good Housekeeping, were also examined and suggest that similar patterns in advertising and articles were also emerging in these publications. In my wider study, advertising in Tatler was examined in order to gauge whether women's increased participation in sport was reflected in its advertising campaigns and also to evaluate the ways in which this participation was represented. Tatler was sampled between 1925 and 1935 and specific focus was placed on campaigns that employed images of sportswomen. Only the years 1925, 1930 and 1935 were analysed in depth because although the Inter-War years were a period of economic instability these particular years were relatively prosperous, thus advertising should therefore not be negatively affected by economic slumps.

48. Average number of pages per edition of Tatler increased from 85 pages in 1925 to 94 pages by 1935.

49. Tatler Magazine, accessed Mitchell Library, Glasgow. See note 48 for further explanation of the sample collected.

50. Advert 96, Tatler, Vol. 116, May 1930.

51. Stanley, Modernizing Tradition, 149.

52. Advert 437, Tatler, Vol. 117, 1930.

53. Advert 83, Tatler, Vol. 116, June 1930.

54. Advert 130, Tatler, Vol. 117, September 1930.

55. Advert 169, Tatler, Vol. 118, November 1930

56. Advert 206, Tatler, Vol. 36, June 1935.

57. Warsh and Tinkler, ‘Feminine Modernity in Interwar Britain and North America, 131.